the art of the brand

People who work in communication or community building–and I would ask readers to note that the root is the same for both words–may possibly not be technically oriented.

There is in fact a continual battle between i/t and “people skills” mentalities, usually over the issue of “why would you want to do that? ”

Recently, in fact today, I received an email from what pretends to be a content aggregator service while actually being the pre-alpha for an mlm that the content here, from someone who has been quoted twice in Ad Age magazine, and twice in the Wall Street Journal doesn’t meet the quality control standards for the “aggregator.”

That’s an interesting thing to be told over the 2nd cup of coffee for the day.

As I reviewed the possibilities I noticed that when a badly trained tech–me–had changed out a wordpress theme after after having to fire a site manager for failure to update graphics, that the archived site material was missing. This might make the blog look “too new” for the aggregator.

This returns us to the question of “value” on which so incredibly much hype and occasional substance is built.

I’m not knocking wordpress here. It’s an intruguing concept, that has taken off about as well as radio once did. I don’t mean radio buttons, I mean radio. (Back in dinosaur days, there was a thing, now pretty much gone, that was the beginning of interactivity on the web. A reader had a choice between clicking a or b, and the next page loaded on the basis of the equivalent of blackening in a circle on an ACT test. This was also the beginning of binary minds taking control of media. It was called a “radio button.”)

So, to be specific about the aggregator, John Reese, and his plan to create a huge mlm to be called Income.com, which will compete with tons of other such “learning programs” already on the market, I can only say this for now: he overplayed his hand. The blog created for people to comment on his updates of his tech and implementation shows 2 classes of people. Functionally, spammers and people who believe spam and hype,  people trying to make an honest living without enough time having banged heads with tech people to understand a back end at any level. This means the distribution network for Income.com will be made from people who will be either useless, or dependent on the thinking of John Reese and his allies, and then dependent on handing them money if they have any hope of making progress in their business model. That means the business model for Income.com will be selling rhe same, tired material to a new class of tired and frustrated entrepreneurs.

It’s a wildly unethical, wildly “net bubble” construct for a business model. As a result, it will probably succeed, as the last net bubble did, for the people in early. Given the pre-alpha, that means if you are reading this, it’s already too late.